True Britt [antikvár]

When my daughter Victoria was thirteen I sat her down and spelt out the vagaries of my life to her as a warning. "You have to understand I am an actress. I'm divorced. I've lived with men without being married. I've had a child out of wedlock. I've got everything stacked against me and if you do anything wrong it will reflect, not on you, but on me," I told her. "And the world will say, 'Well, what do you expect with a mother like that?' " I fear the world may already have judged me, but I do not want Victoria, or my son Nicholai, ever to have to answer for my sins. If sins they are. I am not a courtesan or a promiscuous woman, but I need to love and to be loved. My work, my whole way of being, cannot function without emotional nourishment. Over the years I have resisted the blandishments of Hollywood to mold me as a sex symbol because I would sooner acquire the status of an actress with bona fide credentials. Unfortunately, my personal life has frequently impeded that desire. I am famous, but not for the reasons I still hold sacred. The statistics of the celluloid industry show that I have made twenty-five movies but none, alas, has borne such scrutiny or provoked so much conversation and controversy, as my private life. Forbid this should be my epitaph.